6. MANAGEMENT TRAINING FOR TEAM LEADERSHIP

The Secret of Motivation in Team Leadership
We received some interesting results from our recent survey on team
leadership. One of our questions was what people found most challenging about team leadership.

We received many answers about strategic planning, decision making, communications and so forth. But, a challenge that many people expressed is how to motivate their team.

We are going to make this easy for you. To motivate your people you do not have to be “motivational”. You do not have to be charismatic or even a particularly skilled communicator.

Just do one simple (but incredibly powerful!) thing. MAKE THE LIST OF THINGS YOUR PEOPLE ARE DOING MATCH THE TIME THEY HAVE TO DO THEM.

This is a leadership skill that most managers do not have. It is a skill that is rarely, if ever, taught in management training programs. But, it is the most important aspect of team motivation.

People are motivated when they feel like they are making progress. If their task load is always more than they have time to do they will feel like they are spinning their wheels.

As the leader you can fix this and tap into the power of a motivated team.

Leadership and Selflessness
Wow! A growing number of you are sharing some very interesting and insightful perspectives with your comments to several of our recent posts. This is fantastic; as one of our hopes was that we can all continue to learn from each other.

If you have not had the chance yet, check out the comments and enter the discussion!

Our perspective today involves the management training aspect of leadership and selflessness. We were working earlier today with a group of leaders going through a merger. One of them raised the concern of whether or not they would still have a job after the merger was complete. A very human question. However, leadership calls us to a higher level of thinking.

As a leader we are called to think beyond ourselves, beyond our departments, beyond the people that we lead. We must always think and act on what is best for the success of the entire enterprise we are a part of.

The worst leaders fight for their personal gain. The more evolved leader fights for their people or department. More evolved yet again the leader fights for the success of the enterprise.

But, there is an even more enlightened level of leadership that only the very best reach. These leaders are so selfless that they do not first think of the success of their enterprise. Instead, they are always thinking about what is best for their customers.

In all of your management training to develop excellent team leadership keep your customer at the forefront of your mind. They will always lead you in the right direction.

Ignoring Proven Leadership Techniques
Last week we received an email from a reader of our book, “6 Secrets of Successful Leadership” and we thought she brought up a point worth noting to the rest or our reader community. She wrote:

“When I reached Chapter 5 of your book, Facilitate the Success of Others, I thought this would describe me exactly. In this area I’ve always felt that I am an excellent leader. I do my best to make sure that those who report to me get praised, have plenty of opportunity to grow and use their skills to the fullest. Then I got to the part in the chapter about keeping your ego in check with your fellow leaders and helping them to succeed as well. That brought me to a grinding halt. This is not how my organization is structured. I work in a place where everyone is fighting for recognition and superiority. When I first came to work here it took some adjusting because I know that is not how leadership is proven to work. I tend to look at the whole organization as one big team, but my colleagues felt very differently about it. So I changed. I became just like them in order to play the game that I thought was required. Since reading your book I have made several small changes to follow the rules about leadership that I know have been proven to work rather than the standards that have been set here by the people that have created this environment. I’ve been available to those outside my department and have approached collaboration opportunities with a whole new attitude. My boss visited my office this morning to let me know that my efforts have not gone unnoticed. Thank you.”

Obviously we were extremely happy to receive this email from one if the readers of our book, but not at all surprised by the circumstances in this person’s organization. What we thought was most interesting about this email was that she described going against the leadership skills that she knows have been proven to work to fit in with the others she works with.

This story reinforces our belief that while you should have an ambitious nature and a strong drive to succeed to be a great leader, you should not do it at the expense of the proven approaches to leadership.